


very little changes

by MasterOfAllImagination



Category: Alias (TV)
Genre: M/M, out of all the published and unpublished fic i've written, this is possibly my favorite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 09:13:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6899962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MasterOfAllImagination/pseuds/MasterOfAllImagination
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-series. By a cruel trick of fate, Jack is rendered immortal along with Sloane.</p><p>What do two immortals do with their eternities?  It sounds like a bad joke. It kind of is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	very little changes

Jack is waiting for him in Hong Kong, a shadow on his periphery, an irregularity in the wet puddles at the corner of the far street. Sloane’s feet falter for the beat of one step before he recovers and walks slowly past, the torturous question of _is he real or is he not_ chasing in his footsteps.

The apparition, predictably, follows.

 _You can’t beat me, Arvin_.

Arvin squeezes his eyes shut and wishes for Nadia.

She does not appear.

She has not appeared for a while, now that he is thinking of it. It has been many years since she left him at Milo Rambaldi’s mausoleum: enough years for the once-familiar city of Hong Kong to shift into a new personification of the adjective “glittery,” to shed and yet diversify the grime of its streets, to let the raw architecture of it morph into something entirely new yet faintly (still) recognizable. 

“Arvin,” a familiar voice says at his back, and Sloane clenches the fists buried in the pockets of his long dark wool coat and walks on.

He supposes that this is just another twist in the fate that the universe has wrought for him. Jack had warned him, after all: all those months (years, now?) ago, upon his return from incarceration, a raw confrontation brimming with Jack’s righteous fury on behalf of his daughter’s lost time and memories and Sloane’s easily-quashed disappointment and indignation at Jack’s lack of trust.

 _I will bury you_ , Jack had said. 

He had made no mention of making him _stay_ buried.

Prophecies were funny that way.  If you weren’t careful, they found loopholes.

* * *

 

Jack is waiting for him in London, leaning casually against an angular-framed red box that both is and isn’t a recognizable facsimile of a public phone booth.

Sloane brushes past nothing but air and mutters into the void:

“Leave me _alone_.”

But Jack, like Sloane, was never very good at following orders.

* * *

 

Sloane has a lot of free time on his hands of late. He watches the sky, some days.  He catches a glimpse of a type of flower that Emily once kept in her garden and spends whole afternoons spinning tangents in his mind.  Strangely, he does not cry anymore.  He wonders if he can.

(Perhaps immortality has no use for tears.  Hunger no longer afflicts him, either.  He has yet to test whether or not he still bleeds.)

A lot of that time he spends _searching_ , and after a while, he finds them: Sydney and Vaughn and Isabelle and a new addition called Jack, happy; in a house on a beach.

Sydney calls to him like a siren, but he locks his rudder and steers clear, because the shade of Jack Bristow waits like a jagged rock to pierce his hull if he were to even take the first step towards them, and the inescapability of Jack scares him far more in death than it ever did in life.

And so Sloane wanders on, and, eventually, as the cities he roamed in life continue to change and twist far into his after-life, his thoughts shift into familiar ruts once more. Back to Rambaldi.

Always, always, ever, back to Rambaldi.  Fate is fate is Rambaldi, and Rambaldi is inescapable. This is the knowledge that was forced into Sloane’s chest by the weight of hundreds of tons of rock, needing to scream and giving in to the need and hearing only his own fear echoed back at him from the shattered walls.  Lessons taught through pain do not vacate a man so easily.

* * *

 

Jack is waiting for him in Los Angeles.

“What do you want from me, Jack? To tell you I’m sorry? That I regret everything I ever did?”

“That would be a start.”

Sloane looks down at his hands.  “Because I am. I do.”  When he looks back up, Jack is still there, silent, waiting.  “But you don’t believe me.”

“I believe that you believe it.”

“Isn’t that the definition of sincerity?”

“You regret the _consequences_ of your actions,” Jack corrected. “Not the actions themselves.”

“Isn’t that the definition of _regret_?” Sloane sneers. He cannot help it. His composure breaks.  He bares his gritted teeth and glares at his former-friend, current-unknown-quantity through circular glasses that Emily once jokingly observed make him look innocent.

“Remind me to send you a dictionary one of these days.”

Jack gets up with a smooth movement and leaves Sloane alone at his end of the bench, walking back along the pier toward the shore.  Sloane twists and watches the setting sun make a golden cut-out of his back, his mouth set, knuckles white against the spray-corroded bench.

* * *

 

Jack is waiting for him in Tuscany, which, on the balance of it, really isn’t quite fair of him. 

He left Sydney alone. The least Jack could do is return the favor.

The villa remains, although Emily’s garden does not.  The fact fills Sloane with an implacable anger, and he walks around the edges of a dark-tiled in-ground pool with steps that are as careful and light as a ghost’s.  He stares into its murk and watches as Jack stares back at him.

“Tell me, Jack. How is Sydney these days?”

Jack’s head, reflected in the water of the pool, jerks up.  Sloane raises his gaze and meets his eye in the flesh.  “Dead,” Jack answers simply.  And yet a small smile creases his face. “It was a lovely funeral. Two of her great-grandchildren were pallbearers.”

And, against Sloane’s will, the corner of his mouth twitches.

“That’s nice to hear.” 

They stand there and reflect smiles across their mouths and across the pool and they both don’t know what they would have done had not water separated their respective bodies.

* * *

 

Jack is waiting for him in St. Petersburg, and it is eighteen years later: Sloane has become more adept at tracking time lately. He has had to, as he has retrained his hands and mind to navigate circuitry and security that has evolved and grown and become intelligent.

He is bent over a glowing terminus set incongruously into the wall of an ancient cathedral when he feels a point of cold pressure slide up against the junction of his spine and one of his ribs. 

Ah.

Sloane learns two things, in that moment:

1) Jack, unlike Nadia, was not, in fact, a projection of his own crazed mind, as he had been assuming all these decades.

and

2) This was the _beginning_ of _something_.

In the few suspended seconds between the introduction of the gun barrel and Jack’s growled greeting of “Step away, Arvin,” Sloane has ample opportunity to consider just what this _something_ is.

Eternity? Well, undoubtedly. Every day was the beginning of a new eternity.

The eponymous End? Possibly. If you were a pessimist-- or perhaps if you were just _Jack_ \-- every day was the beginning of the end.

With certain _certain_ - _ness_ , Sloane straightens and meets Jack’s grimace with a grin and closes a hand around his unresisting wrist, and decides that this is the beginning of something _good_.

* * *

 

Jack follows him to Montenegro, where sleek hotels rise to the sky along every beachfront, a tall and modern gate to the sea.  They walk in their shadows and stumble in shifting, detritus-strewn sand, the tails of their jackets whipping in a breeze, a foot or so of distance between their elbows and several miles of it between their hands.

Sloane draws tinted circular shades from an inner pocket and puts them on, his gaze fixed firmly on the next high-rise at their side, in front of them, behind them. Penning them in.

“It’s been a while, Jack.”

“Yes. It has.”

As usual, Sloane is the one who drives their conversation onward.  He is tempted to finish the thought with a half-remembered phrase. Scattered flashes of a slim paperback and a terrace and a metal coffee table whisper behind his eyes:

 _And so we beat on, boats against the tide, borne ceaselessly into the past_ , or something similarly poetic.  It has been a long time.  Sloane no longer remembers.

“I’m not sorry that you’re here with me.”

They do not look at one another.

* * *

 

Jack meets him at the door to a room of the hotels surrounding them.

Wet mouths slide past and around one another as Jack hunches over him and Sloane arches into him.  There is a hand at his waist (whose waist?) and slow hard lines rubbed back and forth by a single thumb.  Gasps that seemingly come from the air between them (what air?) pop into the vacuum created around them.

Jack shifts, and tugs Sloane closer into him, and Sloane’s hands reach up and tangle into Jack’s hair and provide him an anchor on which he pulls, repeatedly, like sounding the depths of the Mississippi on a wheel boat. Gasps turn to hisses turn to unrestrained, desperate, angry moans, and hands begin to travel and travel _faster_.

Later, they are both bare-chested, and they lie on their sides and face one another, arms slung over each other’s waist, Jack dragging an idle finger through the hair on Sloane’s chest.

“Let’s go somewhere,” Sloane suggests.

Jack considers the idea. “Where?”

“Somewhere that isn’t painful,” Sloane says immediately, seemingly without having to think about it.  Or perhaps having already given it a great deal of thought.  He catches Jack’s wandering hand in both of his own before it has the chance to clench and still in surprise/confusion/anger/pain, and brings it to his lips, squeezing his eyes shut tight as he kisses each knuckle on each of Jack’s fingers.

After a pause that may have been several days in length, Jack responds with:

“Paris.”

Sloane raises an eyebrow.  “Really, Jack. Paris?”

“Yes, Arvin.  _Paris._ ”

Sloane, most certainly, smiles as he meet’s Jack’s eyes. Jack’s smile is… not quite as noticeable, but it is there. In the lines around his eyes. In the small scar above his upper lip.

They go to Paris. They walk arm-in-arm down a bridge half-collapsed under the weight of too many cheap metal locks, and they order food in French that sounds as dated to the natives as Jane Austen sounded to 20th century scholars. 

This is the first last good day. 

* * *

 

In Australia, Sloane cloaks himself in bitterness and leaves.  The fruit of his fury ferments and turns to wine; a sour vintage that etches a permanent scowl onto Sloane’s face with its pure acidity for the next fifty-eight years.

Several governments fall.  They are no more amusement to Sloane than a set of toppled dominoes are to a child.

Sometimes Jack is there to stop him. Sometimes, he isn’t.  But Sloane knows that when he isn’t, it is because he _chooses not to be_. 

He picks up the thread of Rambaldi like an old fraying sweater, and he worries and worries at it until he starts to lose track of time again. It is quite easy. Scale ceases to matter in an undying world, and Rambaldi always was-- and ever will be-- timeless.

When he sees his daughter again for the first time in two millennia, Jack thinks: _Inevitable genetic reoccurrence._

But Sloane thinks of Yeats, and endures the echoic repetition of a long-ago-glimpsed line of poetry in his mind for several days before swirling it away into a state of semi-banishment:

 _Surely the Second Coming is at hand_.

* * *

Jack is waiting for him in Hong Kong, except it is not called Hong Kong anymore.

They begin again.

After all, they have all the time in the world.

 

**Author's Note:**

> It feels good to finally be publishing this. I'm aware the Alias fandom is deader than Dickens' doornail, but I couldn't not introduce this to the light of day. It is technically unfinished in the sense that I had intended to write more of it, but the creative vitality that seizes me at the wee hours in the midst of crippling procrastination is a fickle feeling to recreate, let alone recapture. But I think it ends nicely just as it is.


End file.
